I'm planning to take some portraits using a Graflex quarter-plate SLR and to make the experience as authentic as possible planned to use Pan F guessing that ISO25 was probably state of the art back then.

A bit of digging suggests that the slowest commonly-available sheet film would be FP4 and someone has suggested Foma 320 for an old-fashioned look.

Can anyone here say what ISOs (or ASAs I suppose) were available in the early 1920s and also any comments on a suitably aesthetic film (and I suppose developer) combination?

Ideally things available in Europe.

David

If you want to roughly replicate the colour balance of the era, you might try Ilford's Ortho film. It's rated at 80 ASA in daylight, 40 ASA under artificial light. It has exceedingly fine grain, and I've been very pleased with its image quality. It's only available in 4x5.

Thanks William - a useful point - that the colour balance of the film will have more influence on the result than the grain or perhaps contrast - after all my hero will presumably have used an appropriate contrast grade of paper.

I'd best do some digital simulations to see what I'm going to end up with - basically I think drop the red channel out.

I was expecting to have to cut film down to quarter plate.

Regards

David

Did your intentions come to anything?
Did you have to guillotine down a larger sheet size? Ilford do issue liunusual sizes. Whether they'd do quarter-plate Ilford Ortho in a sensible box size is debatable.
I am thinking that 50ASA might have bee a high speed film for those times & Ilford Orttho with a 1 stop ND filter in front of the lens would be fine.

Ilford has apparently been doing an annual no-minimum-quantity (I presume they mean no no minimum on number of boxes) less-common-size ordering window. I don't know whether the ortho film is available through that.

Developing ortho film by hand under a safelight is probably more dramatic for story purposes than daylight-tank developing... <grin/>